


unexpected advances in the field of entomology

by Crowned_Ladybug



Category: Half-Life
Genre: (in a positive light), Bugs & Insects, Family Bonding, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mostly comfort tho, Mute Gordon Freeman, a moment of calm amidst everything, but more importantly Alyx missing her Uncle Barney, freehoun if you squint, i think that's a good way to put it?, set in some vague point of time during hl2 i suppose?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:39:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29038764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowned_Ladybug/pseuds/Crowned_Ladybug
Summary: “Okay, okay, cup your hands, I’m gonna give you something.”Some bitter part of Gordon thinks to himself that it’d better be worth it, momentarily trading his words for a trinket. But the rest of Gordon is a lot less bitter and awhole lotmore fond of Alyx, and that part takes priority, and so he listens.When Alyx draws her hands away from Gordon’s, there is something sitting on the bulky HEV gloves.---Just like everyone else in this world, Alyx Vance grew up on stories about Gordon Freeman.
Relationships: Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance
Comments: 3
Kudos: 65





	unexpected advances in the field of entomology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bee_bro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bee_bro/gifts).



> A rare moment for me, writing one fic to procrastinate another. So have this while I bite off more than I can chew with a HLVRAI fic.
> 
> Because guess who's added Half-Life (without the funny AI this time) to their Wall of Hyperfixations? Yeah, me. It's been there for a little while but then the other day I finished watching Wayne's HL:A vods and it both obliterated me and sealed my fate in terms of "will I ever write for this though?"
> 
> Dedicated to Dima for having a single sentence of a reaction to something I said to them that sent me into writing this on the spot.

It’s a rare moment when Gordon is allowed to catch his breath. Maybe the first one that lasts more than an instant since he woke up on the wrong side of twenty years. So he sits against a crumbling, dirty wall on the crumbling, dirty ground, one hand still loosely wrapped around his trusty crowbar, and waits. Rests. Mostly waits.

Waits for this moment to turn out to be a simple mistake in the great cosmic timetable and for him to have to scramble up any second again to rectify the minutes he’s stolen. Because Gordon Freeman doesn’t rest. He doesn’t stop and he doesn’t grow weary and he doesn’t regret. Gordon Freeman never retreats and never falters. Gordon Freeman tears through the world while trying to save it.

Gordon Freeman is so fucking _tired_.

Alyx is climbing around and digging into piles of rubble not a stone throw away. She’s still armed and always nimble, and the way she stops every other moment to look around to make sure they’re alone speaks volumes of what it is like, growing up in the apocalypse. But she somehow still manages to find joy in digging out bent pieces of metal and broken, sun-bleached plastic from under concrete rubble in fingerless gloves, and Gordon watches her with the closest thing he’s known to peace in a while.

Then she springs up with a shrill shout from where she’d been sticking her hands into some little cavern under all that rubble, and Gordon’s hand is on his gun before he can process that she’s grinning. Not in the mad-sharp, let’s-kill-some-fascists kinda way she sometimes does in battle, but in a way Gordon is not used to anymore. In a way people in the apocalypse seldom find reasons to grin.

He tries to relax back against the wall behind his back as Alyx books it for him, though his eyes still flit around looking for intruders.

“Gordon, look!” Alyx doesn’t let his mind wander, and before Gordon knows it she’s on her knees beside him, her two hands clasped together like she’s hiding something precious. She pries her hands apart just a little bit and peeks inside as if whatever treasure she’d found in a pile of concrete and Tetanus hazards could somehow disappear into thin air in a few seconds’ time. “Okay, okay, cup your hands, I’m gonna give you something.”

Some bitter part of Gordon thinks to himself that it’d better be worth it, momentarily trading his words for a trinket. But the rest of Gordon is a lot less bitter and a _whole lot_ more fond of Alyx, and that part takes priority, and so he listens.

When Alyx draws her hands away from Gordon’s, there is something sitting on the bulky HEV gloves.

For the lack of a better word, Gordon would call it a bug. Or an insect, anyhow. It’s not a snark, but it looks nothing like any insect Gordon has seen back in his day (and boy has he seen a _lot_ of them), and the five legs and the green glow filtering out from between the segments of its carapace point fairly obvious signs towards this being some sort of Xen creature, if not a Xen creature already successfully adapted to life on Earth.

It is also, quite possibly, the greatest thing that has happened to Gordon since he got dropped in a future that didn’t and still doesn’t feel real.

(Okay, maybe it isn’t _the_ greatest thing. It cannot beat seeing Barney again. And Kleiner. And Eli, and Alyx, who, _fuck_ , last Gordon remembers he’d been wondering what to get her for her fifth birthday and _now she’s 24 and knows how a gun works_.

The bug is still pretty great though.)

The silent eagerness that Alyx is now watching him with is not unlike the four-year-old who had once given Gordon a crayon drawing to put in his office. To make it less boring, she’d said.

Gordon gently places the maybe-bug on his own leg to free up his hands. It sets about investigating some ridge where two pieces of his armour fit together but doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. Good. Gordon would like to look at it more later, please.

“Thank you,” he signs, for the hundredth time grateful that Barney and Kleiner had chosen to honour his memory by continuing to teach ASL to Alyx (and to everyone else who asked, and there had apparently been quite a few. Popularising sign amongst hearing people had not been his main objective when he’d saved the world the first time, but damn if it isn’t a nice side effect). “I love bugs.”

His hands hover after that, not sure what else to say. He’s sure Alyx doesn’t know anything more in-depth about entomology in ASL than “ _oh! A bug!_ ” since there would be little reason to learn, so there is no point in going on a ramble of his own about the peculiarities this one probably has. He’s been grabbing insects and reading through piles of books about them and letting some of them loose in the classroom even though he didn’t _mean_ to cause chaos for as long as he can remember.

But anecdotes aren’t what the One Free Man is here for, these days.

“I know,” Alyx says before he could figure out what else to add, still smiling, keeping an eye on the bug on Gordon’s leg but directing that smile at him nonetheless. “I’ve heard stories.”

_I’ve heard stories._

Gordon has heard that phrase so, so many times since he woke up here. Since the start (continuation) of this mess. _People have heard stories._ _Everyone_ has heard stories, and if they didn’t, they made up their own.

Stories about the One Free Man, how he fought his way through Black Mesa with just a crowbar and saved the world like it was just anoher day in the office. How he survived the end of the world while no one knows, no one _mentions_ that he’s the one who’d _caused_ it. Stories about how many monsters he’s killed and how many lives he’s saved and how now the world rests upon his shoulders again, because people have been wishing on him for twenty years and he could only make the occasion now.

They tell him about those stories when he walks away from a battle that’s a triumph to them and another moment struggling to hold onto his own life to him. When he’s bloodied and bruised, his brain fogged up and body barely upright in the suit the world has started treating as his skin.

He knows people have heard stories. He doesn’t want to hear them in turn, and no one wants to hear his.

Gordon Freeman is the Saviour of Humanity. The rest doesn’t matter.

Probably no one bothers to remember the rest anymore, anyway.

He shakes himself out of his thoughts, out of that _phrase_ , and asks, feeling dumb the moment he makes the one sign and nothing else: “Stories?”

“Uhh, yeah?”

Alyx _does_ look at him like it’s a dumb question, too.

When he doesn’t say anything else, she leans her shoulder against the wall, body turned his way still to see properly when he signs. “Of course, I _grew up on_ stories about the one Gordon Freeman! What did you _expect_?”

Really, what _did_ he expect? To these people, he’s a legend. More words than humanity. Of course-

“If I had a bullet for every time I’d pestered Barney into telling me about the time he had a giant mosquito in his dorm room and he wouldn’t go in until you rescued him from it, we wouldn’t have to be scavenging ammo off the Combine!”

There’s a moment of silence as Gordon processes. In his shock, the only thing he can think to sign in response is: “It was a cranefly, actually.”

He has to fingerspell _cranefly_ a second time when Alyx just stares at him in confusion because he’d done it too fast, and then she laughs. “I have no clue what that is, but I believe you. I don’t think I’ve learned a single thing about pre-war bugs from Barney.”

And somehow, Gordon finds it in himself to smile back without faking it. Barney’s always had that effect on him. As it turns out, maybe Alyx does too.

“Yeah, he never really liked them,” his hands hover for a moment, wanting to talk more about the good old days, even if it aches, because he wants to share this with someone who also knows Barney and Kleiner and Eli, who’s apparently _heard stories_. But he chooses to ask the question eating away at him instead. “So you’ve heard...stories? About me?”

He doesn’t know a sign for _anecdote_. Just the ones for _story_ and _legend_. Words that now describe him, apparently.

He hopes Alyx gets it anyway.

She chews on her lip for a moment. The bug on Gordon’s leg has wandered to his knee, and she absently reaches up and plucks it from there. She lets it run around in her palms as she talks.

“You know, all the Resistance kids, out on the playground, _everyone_ wanted to be Gordon Freeman. The Hero. The Saviour of Humanity. Maybe you’ve heard of him,” she chuckles, but something is sad about it. She flips her hand over to let the bug continue its trek on the back of it. “And me, every night I fell asleep to stories about you and Barney racing through the vents, or the time you chugged an unmarked beaker on a bet, or the time you worked so late you got locked in the labs and had to be rescued. There was always _something_.

She sighs. “They got...rarer, over time, as Barney-...as _everyone_ got busy. You know. But I think it helped them,” she stares down at the bug in her hands and it chooses to stare back, and for the thousandth time Gordon can see the pain of growing up in a world that was broken before you knew you had to fix it peeking through. “To talk about you like a _friend_ , not, you know...”

She waves her free hand in a vague motion, and Gordon _does_ know.

A hero. A legend. A wish for something that can save humanity when they cannot save themselves.

But that isn’t what Gordon wants to talk about.

(Not now. Not in the shelter of a ruined wall, in the shelter of a still moment and a friendly conversation. Not when for once, he’s allowed to talk about something else.

 _Be_ someone else.

He wonders when the Gordon who got distracted by cool bugs and told Kleiner where his glasses were when they were on the top of his head and he couldn’t find them, the Gordon who watched bad sci-fi movies with Barney too late into the night just so they could tear them apart, he wonders when _that_ Gordon had become the Gordon who is _someone else_. When this orange tin can and a crowbar and a destiny had become _him_.

He just hopes that when the time comes, he can reclaim that old Gordon again.)

He raps his knuckles on his own armoured thigh to get Alyx’s attention. “I didn’t need to be _rescued_ , by the way. When I worked late.”

Stretched over the lingering sadness, Alyx’s grin is practically _ecstatic_.

“I got locked in, yes, but I didn’t even notice. I was _working_ ,” he says with a meaningful look. “Barney was the one who was convinced I was some damsel in distress trapped in the horrible company of some graphs and a company e-mail or two.”

“And so he came to rescue you?”

“Yes,” Gordon could swear he’s _grinning_ now, and he’s so out of practice it feels a bit like forcing rusted machinery until it works again, but damn if it doesn’t feel good. “He was definitely more worried than I was.”

“Oh, I’m _never_ letting him live this down,” she puts the bug back on Gordon’s leg, and Gordon is about to tell her that he’s _counting on it_ , when she speaks again. “Okay, okay, and what about the one where-...”

She launches into another anecdote, this one apparently from Kleiner, and then part of it from Kleiner and Barney’s arguments over the exact details. Gordon has never been more glad to be asked for input on something than he is now.

Eventually, they will have to move on from here. Eventually, there will be shouting and blood and gunfire again. But for now, for now Gordon can just _sit_ , leaning against this ruined wall and letting an alien bug run around on his leg. For now he can listen to stories about Gordon Freeman, not the Saviour of Humanity, but some guy with a theoretical physics degree and nerd glasses, the way his friends remember him.

And for now, for the _first time_ , he can correct the details of said stories, new brushstrokes in the picture painted for Alyx by her bedtime stories.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Technically you could accuse me of doing more research on what harmless insect would have been stuck in Barney's room than I did on the actual canon of this game, because I've never played nor seen anyone play hl2 and I've yet to go extensively wiki-diving about it. I know most of what I know from fanfics and tumblr. Also that the City 17 Railway Station is inspired by the Western one of Budapest, because that's pretty neat.
> 
> [my main tumblr](pristine-starlight.tumblr.com/) | [my art tumblr](crowned-ladybug.tumblr.com/)


End file.
